Pouring beer in front of light in 300 fps 2K wide screen and 150 fps 3K on the Epic.

[Björn Benckert]

Just to show. To me these files looks almost more film than I think tim does. I love the epic and when Crille Forssberg a swedish DOP asked if we could do some pre shoot tests for a beer commercial in high speed. I was curious since I did a (underexposed) bluesmen job in 300 fps before that did not look to good. But I have to say I think those tests beats every high speed stuff i seen. We worked a lot with the phantom cameras and also I been looking at uncompressed 4k, HD and such just about every day in since back in 2001 when we got our genesis 4k scanner. And to me the Epic renders an image that looks... more filmic than film. It does not have the gate weave, dust and scratches. And I don't miss any of them. But it does have that dynamic curve that film has but to me it's even more so than film. I find the raw files softer towards the peaks and the whites does not come over a color. Film can for example in similar shots tint right before the highlights, in a bad way. So there is streaks of yellow right before the clip, Epic is even all the way out. I simply love it.

Those where shot with our B&L Super Baltar 20mm that I also love. If any think it brings even more dynamics to the shots and the flaws of the lens like the chromatic abbreviations towards the edges I find appeling strange enough it gives a vantage look in an subtile nice way.
I seen a lot of threads on "how does 300fps look?" and so on and all I can say is that it looks better than most things you ever seen.

Here is some links to the files:

http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/film/2k_still_syndicatefilm.jpg
http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/film/3k_still_syndicatefilm.jpg
http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/film/2k_still_raw.jpg
http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/film/3k_still_raw.jpg

and a quicktime of the 2k stuff:

http://www.syndicate.se/Files/~usr/film/2k_wide_300fps_H264_1024x576_1.mov

Grading was done straight from r3D in flame using:
Gateway import into batch, Red gamma2, red gamma film, full de noise, full OPDL, Flame Denoise, Lut editor, log to lin with a peak role off , sapphire sharpen and then regain with a custom kodak 200ASA mimicking grain.

 

[Stephen Mick]

Looks fantastic, Bjorn! Can you share your process for camera setup and prep? Did you have to black balance for the off frame rates you shot? Please, do tell the details!

 

[Björn Benckert]

Looks fantastic, Bjorn! Can you share your process for camera setup and prep? Did you have to black balance for the off frame rates you shot? Please, do tell the details!

I actually tried to black balance for the framerate, I had the camera next to me when I was sitting working all day but it did not work. Got some error message: " could not complete blackshading" or such... was about to ask if thats a bug on current firmware. But I blackshaded at default shot a test and pulled the colors around and the result was so good so I did not think much more of it...

Camera was set to f4.0 360shutter (to get more light) and iso800 and we only had one lamp (small arri sun) with a chimera. Back lit form about a meters distance with 45 degrees form above and a A4 paper as a bouncer. the exposure was so that we had a small,small dot on the noise indicator and nothing on the peak meter.

The flame denies is fantastic, it's not that there is a lot of noise in the raw files but it just hacks of the super subtle digital noise patterns and that allows for a quite heavy sharpen with high amplitude, before putting the grain on. in telecine they have the (i think it's called) hacwac and when scanning film they can crank that quite hard and just get a lot of sharpness and only gain some in the film grain. When treating digital images the CCD patterns and compression patterns comes quite quickly the flame denoise node just push that out of the question on the epic. For phantom on the other hand it does not work since thier patterns seems to be a lot bigger and the also quite often get the vertical line / border form poor black shading that appears as soon as sharpen or contrast is pulled. In short I like the epic

 

[Paul Russell]

I've been shooting high speed stuff recently too and cannot black shade. I think it's a bug that's come up in recent versions of the firmware.

 

[Stephen Mick]

That brings me to a question (not to jack your thread, Bjorn)…

If you can't successfully black shade at 4K 96FPS (for example), would it make sense to at least black shade at 4K 24FPS? And if you can't black shade at 3K 150FPS, would it again make sense to do it at 3K 24FPS? Would this be of any benefit at all?

 

[Björn Benckert]

That brings me to a question (not to jack your thread, Bjorn)…

If you can't successfully black shade at 4K 96FPS (for example), would it make sense to at least black shade at 4K 24FPS? And if you can't black shade at 3K 150FPS, would it again make sense to do it at 3K 24FPS? Would this be of any benefit at all?

I think or guess. all black shading is done for the full sensor i.e 5k or? is the camera actually shading only part of the sensor if doing smaller resolutions? So if it is can it black shade at higher fps than 98 ?

again the above is my guessing. Red would know.

Also as our programer stated, the black shading issues would be more prominent when shooting in lower frame rates than what the shadings where done for then if shooting in higher frame rates then the shading was done for.. that was his, a bit more qualified guessing...